Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Curiously, Castilians were reluctant to let the empire penetrate their own homes in the peninsula. We have already seen (Chapter 6) that the rest of Europe was eager to learn from Spain, and translated its literature eagerly. But Spaniards were not so keen to find out about the rest of the world. In the time of Philip II the Jesuit Ribadeneira went so far as to accuse Castilians of being ‘arrogant and unwilling to learn’.58 It was an age when the exotic tastes and extraordinary experiences of the outside world came to influence and modify much Western culture.59 But after three hundred years of direct contact with America, the Philippines and Mediterranean Europe, Spain tended to remain impervious to change. It is curious, for example, that the Spaniards appear never to have shown much interest in the rich and exotic non-profitable produce to be found in the overseas territories. They took very quickly to tobacco, first described to them by a Seville physician, Monardes, in 1569. It became, and has remained, an essential component of the Spanish way of life. But the detailed reports sent back home by the historian Oviedo and by others, about plants, fruits and flora, fell on stony ground. It was left to the British, Dutch and French to publish the first comprehensive surveys of New World botany.60 The first published drawings of New World maize, for instance, came out in Strasbourg in 1539 and Basel in 1542. The pioneering botanical work of Francisco Hernández, done in the 1570s during his travels in the Caribbean and Mexico, lay gathering dust in the library of the Escorial and did not see the light of day until a group of Italian intellectuals sponsored its publication in Rome in 1651. Non-European foods, among them the tomato and the bean, penetrated only very slowly into the Spanish diet. Indifference to the world outside was also reflected in the absence of guidebooks. Tens of thousands of Spaniards had been to the far ends of the earth and seen unprecedented marvels, yet they never came to develop a literature of travel. Their most common travel book in the sixteenth century remained the one written by the Piedmontese Giovanni Botero.

  The poor reputation of Spain in matters of courtesy, culture and lodging (the peninsula was considered to have the worst inns in Europe) excluded it automatically from the itinerary taken by European gentlemen doing the Grand Tour in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Many visitors to the country were open-minded enough to recognize its pleasures and attractions, but the prevailing sentiment was that of the Englishman John Holles in the early seventeenth century, that ‘Spain is to be passed through, not to be dwelt in.’61 Europeans were not impressed by the state of culture in Spain. French, English and Italian intellectuals who visited the peninsula all took the same view. The nation had made little attempt to absorb European culture, and as a result the rest of Europe despised it. ‘The ignorance is immense and the sciences are held in horror’, an Italian nobleman commented on a journey through the peninsula in 1668, and in the same years an English traveller, Willughby, concluded that ‘in all kinds of learning the Spaniards are behind the rest of Europe’.62 They would have been comforted to learn that many educated Spaniards shared their views. ‘How sad and shameful it is’, a young Valencian doctor, Juan de Cabriada, exclaimed in 1687, ‘that like savages we have to be the last to receive the innovations and knowledge that the rest of Europe already has!’63 Spain remained prominent by its absence from the European intellectual and scientific scene. When the Royal Society of London in the 1660s began to organize its scientific links with European intellectuals, Spaniards did not feature. The puzzle, which still eludes any easy explanation, is why the most universal society of the globe was unable, after centuries of imperial experience, to discourse on equal terms with other European nations that shared the same background.64

  The silence of Pizarro was not a local phenomenon restricted to a momentary confrontation in the Andes. It was a silence that encompassed continents. Even a reactionary clergyman like Philip II's adviser Villavicencio felt that it was important to warn the king that Spaniards had no future in the Netherlands ‘for they neither know the language nor understand the laws and customs’.65 The failure of empire to overcome the cultural divide was nothing short of astonishing. The Greek and Roman empires had in some measure been predicated on a conscious superiority over the nations with which they collided. By contrast, the nations with whom Spaniards came into contact always insisted that their own cultures were superior. Spain's discourse with them was, as a consequence, normally conducted from a position of inferiority. This evoked from Castilians, who felt that their position as masters entitled them to deference, the logical reactions of anger, frustration, pride and even stupor. Northern Italian intellectuals, reconciled by now to the fact that they were always being invaded by barbarians, continued to perceive Spaniards as culturally beneath them. In Brussels the Spaniards were scarcely better treated. The worst treatment of all was reserved for them in the New World, where the Creole élites, even while recognizing their European roots, preferred to express their pride rather in the great American civilizations that had preceded the ‘conquest’. In the early eighteenth century the Peruvian marquis of Valleumbroso despised the peninsular Spaniards and claimed instead to be descended from the Inca; he wore Inca-style clothes, had himself addressed as ‘apu’ instead of ‘señor’, and preferred to speak Quechua.66

  During the Napoleonic Wars, when the empire was on the verge of political collapse because of events in Europe and the threat of rebellion in America, Spaniards in the peninsula attempted desperately to claim that there existed a great cultural unity – what later politicians would come to call ‘Hispanidad’, ‘Spanishness’ – that bound together all the peoples of the imperial commonwealth. The governing body in war-torn Spain, the Junta Central, wrote to the city council of Bogotá in 1809, in the following terms:

  There exists a union between the two hemispheres, between the Spaniards of Europe and America, a union that can never be destroyed, because it is grounded upon the most solid bases that tie men together: a common origin, the same language, laws, customs, religion, honour, sentiments, relations and interests. These are the ties that unite us.

  When steps were taken to summon a Cortes of all free Spaniards in 1810, it was proposed that representatives of the provinces of America and of Asia should also be convoked.67 It was suggested that there be two deputies for the Philippines, and up to twenty-four for all the American territories. The proposal did not, evidently, recognize any rights to autonomy of the overseas territories, but simply intended to identify them with the cause of ‘all true Spaniards’ who were fighting against the French in the peninsula. This new version of imperial mythology found little acceptance among élite Americans. The Junta in Spain, anxious to obtain their support, proclaimed that the overseas territories were not colonies but ‘an essential and integral part of the Spanish monarchy’, and that Spanish Americans were ‘free men’, ‘equal in rights’ (to quote a decree of the Cortes of Cadiz in October 1810) ‘to those of this peninsula’.68 At last, three hundred years after the foundation of the city of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, the Spaniards needed the empire, just as eighty years later (as they were losing it to the Americans) they were also to feel that they needed Cuba. And they needed the empire because the empire had in effect created Spain.

  Castile and the Spanish realms had risen to prominence because of their impressive capacity to harness the resources of others: the Neapolitans, the Genoese, the Franche-Comtois, the Flemings, the Nahuas, the peoples of Tawantinsuyu, the Chinese. And, thanks to the voluntary collaboration of élites everywhere, the effort paid off. The trade of the Mediterranean, the silver of Potosí, converted Seville into the metropolis of the West, stimulated economic growth, shipbuilding, and commerce, attracted the merchants of Christendom, and encouraged the emigration of small groups of Spaniards to all points of the globe. This great co-operative enterprise brought Spaniards together and began to give them a common purpose. Whether gathered before the walls of Granada or assembled on the banks of the Danube, Castilian nobles felt a justifiable pride in the amazing series of events tha
t had bestowed on them a measure of world leadership.

  Unfortunately, the very extent of international collaboration undermined Spain's ability to innovate technologically. Portugal supplied the early expertise in navigation, ships and pilots; Italy supplied the ships, manpower and weaponry in the Mediterranean; Germans and Netherlanders provided soldiers and technology; Genoese, Flemings and Portuguese provided financial expertise. Castilians demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of learning from the technologies they encounted,69 but their achievements never passed beyond the level of borrowing. Depending in every detail on their allies, they deprived themselves of the means to subsist on their own. This, of course, was no immediate problem. The empire was never without friends. As the War of Succession showed, none of the European powers was going to let the profits of empire fall into the hands of anyone else, and by the time of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Spain was in theoretical control of a larger extent of the world's surface than it had ever before possessed.

  Many scholars, including the present writer, have habitually argued that the cost of running this enormous empire crippled Spain. It is easy to document the conclusion from the words of Spaniards themselves. The opinion, however, is based on a mistaken view of the costs involved. The Castilian treasury was always in debt, from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella onwards, yet it managed for two centuries to stave off collapse. This was only in part because of the enormous advantage of wealth from the New World. The real secret of the empire, as in the case of any good multinational, was the successful integration of regional businesses and an effective ‘autonomy of cost’, paying for each enterprise on the spot rather than from the centre. Disaster at specific points in the business structure brought laments from the directors in Madrid but seldom affected the viability of the company. A battle lost, a fleet sunk, a shipment that did not arrive, were major hazards that seemed to portend calamity; but so long as the investors did not rebel or lose confidence the business survived. It consequently makes little sense to talk of shortage of men or money. The empire never lacked men: its armies down to 1763 were always predominantly foreign armies. And it never lacked money: foreign traders and financiers – and even foreign pirates – continued to underwrite the empire's regional economies even while they were trying to undermine the extent of control from Madrid.

  When empire comes to an end, it is habitually seen as the cause of all the residual ills. No empire has, at any time, been viewed in retrospect as a success. It is this acute consciousness of failure, unfortunately, that helps to launch the endless mythologies associated with the history of Spain's world dominion. Spaniards blamed everybody else, and everybody else blamed Spain: they were the two perennial faces of imperial confrontation.

  A good example of Spaniards blaming others can be found in the writings of the soldier Marcos de Isaba, who served Philip II faithfully but in the 1580s at the end of his career questioned (after barely one generation of the empire's existence!) whether the effort had been worthwhile. ‘In all the time’, he wrote, ‘that I have spent outside Spain, travelling, speaking to Italians, French, Dutch, Walloons, Franche-Comtois, Turks and Arabs’, the only consequence he could see was ‘that our nation is hated and detested by everybody’. Fiercely nationalist in attitude, he saw good only in Castile and bad everywhere else. His comments merit quotation:

  These nations outside Spain that are subjects, friends or allies of His Majesty, are by nature inconstant, unreliable, restive and seditious. The greatness of our king and the blessed name of Spaniard have few friends. In the past Spaniards were well loved by all peoples, but for the last ninety years we are hated and detested and all because of the wars. Envy is a worm that does not rest, it is the cause of the resentment and hatred shown to us by Turks, Arabs, Jews, French, Italians, Germans, Czechs, English and Scots, who are all enemies of Spaniards. Even in the New World there is hatred and detestation for the valorous arms of this nation.70

  Like Americans and Russians of the twentieth century, the Spaniards had to learn to live with universal hatred. ‘The hatred for Spaniards’, a Spanish official in Brussels reported to Philip IV in 1632, ‘is unbelievable.’71 Protected by their own view of how the world should be run, most Spaniards were incapable of seeing that there was a price to be paid for their imperial role. ‘I don't know what there is in the nation and empire of Spain’, an official in Milan lamented in 1570, ‘that none of the peoples in the world subject to it bears it any affection.’72

  On the other hand, a classic case of how the others blamed Spain can be found in the experience of Naples. As we have seen (Chapter 10), Italians never ceased to claim that Spaniards had ruined the south of the Italian peninsula. The philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce was the first to question this dogma. When contemplating the problems of the Mezzogiorno and the ‘lack of a national political life’ in nineteenth-century Naples, Croce was inspired to analyse the writings of an economist writing in 1613, Antonio Serra, who pointed out that if Naples was poor it was really because it had not been any help to itself. It was not the Spaniards who were to blame, but the Neapolitans themselves. If foreign (that is, Genoese and Venetian) capitalists got rich in the Mezzogiorno it was because of ‘the industries which they, in default of the natives, promoted’.73 As a consequence of Croce's writing, no serious historian thinks that Italy's problems were exclusively the fault of Spanish imperial rule. The impact of imperialism was always ambiguous. In Italy the kingdom of Naples failed to overcome its problems, but Milan by contrast benefited from the economic activity generated by Spain's military presence.74 After the years of devastation and destruction caused by the Eighty Years' War against Spain, the northern Netherlands could look back with satisfaction on the economic benefits they had reaped. Viewed in perspective, domination by a foreign power did not necessarily lead to disaster.75

  Spaniards themselves were not sure whether their imperial adventure had been a success. International power, the moralists (as well as many taxpayers) never ceased to point out, had not made the country better. A handful of intellectuals stretched out their hands to complain to their allies in the empire that things were not going well. ‘We wish to be seen as champions of what is good’, the Aragonese historian Argensola wrote in 1602 to the Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius, ‘but at the very most we are ghosts and apparitions.’ The poet Francisco de Quevedo commented mordantly in a letter in 1604 to the same: ‘there [in Belgium] we consume our soldiers and money, here we consume ourselves’.76 In the high tide of empire thousands of Spaniards had escaped with alacrity from the poverty of Spain – ‘that wretched Spain where no amount of work can wipe out misery’77 – to the rich promise of the Caribbean, the New World, and Asia. But the promise, many of them felt, was a false one, like the ghosts and apparitions spoken of by Argensola. ‘Don't be deceived, don't listen to what they say about America,’ a disillusioned colonist wrote home from New Spain in 1593, ‘would to God I did not live where I live, God knows how things are’.78

  Imperial enterprise would always be an ambiguous experience, reason for pride of achievement but also for shame. And the pride and shame were shared in equal measure by all those peoples, from every continent of the globe, without whose resources the creation of the worldwide empire would have been, quite simply, impossible. The price paid for global dominion was always high. ‘Our country’, observed Peter Paul Rubens as he pondered the part of Belgium in the war arrangements of Spain, ‘must serve as the battlefield and the theatre of the tragedy.’79 At every level, the tragedy was immense. The spreading of the gospel in the missions of California, for example, brought no temporal salvation to the Indians, whose numbers plummeted. ‘They live well when they are free’, lamented a Franciscan missionary, ‘but as soon as we reduce them to a Christian and community life they sicken and die.’80 And there were costs that were impossible to measure, in which Spaniards also assumed a crucial role: the hundreds of thousands who perished in the wars, the tens of thousands who died in battles a
nd shipwrecks at sea. Castilians died far from home. Generations of mothers and wives would remember the fields of Flanders as the ‘cemetery of Spaniards’. Very many died spectacularly and meaninglessly, like the four thousand soldiers who were sent to the New World in 1619 and a few days out to sea perished in a storm in the Atlantic; it was a disaster twice as great as that of the Titanic. ‘The loss is very great and much felt here,’ the English ambassador reported from Madrid, ‘yet they make show as if they would instantly repair all.’81

  And they were only a tiny fraction of the cost. The real cost in the Netherlands, more than the twelve hundred executed by Alba, were the tens of thousands of Belgians and Dutch who died defending their homes. Brutalities perpetrated during the age of world power were very often the responsibility of Spaniards. ‘We killed eight thousand men in about two hours and a half’, a young Basque who took part in the capture of Atahualpa proudly wrote home to his father, ‘and we took much gold and clothing.’82 The deaths formed part of the setting of world power, and had many counterparts. On 4 November 1576, the memorable day of the Spanish Fury, the mutinous Spanish tercios sacked and burned the rich trading metropolis of Antwerp, leaving eight thousand people dead.83 The toll in lives was, however, no less the responsibility of those who helped to sustain Spanish power. The Tlaxcalan confederates of Cortés who helped to slay and destroy at Tenochtitlan, the German regiments that slaughtered without mercy at St Quentin in 1557 and at Mechelen in October 1572, were part of the same apparatus of military savagery. Outside Europe, the cost was the thousands of Africans who rotted and died every year in Portuguese, English and Dutch slaving ships in the long passage across the Atlantic; the millions of indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded by pathogens, plants and animals of the Old World. It was beyond all doubt an immense saga of glory for many, but for very many others it was one of almost unrelieved desolation.